The Circle Game
by Reuladair
Summary: Spike/Dawn, cos i wish the writers would fix them and they haven't. set somewhere around Storyteller.


Feedback: If ya want. Try not to tear me to pieces tho, I'm fragile. Disclaimer: I own nothing. At all. Rating: PG, probably between Get It Done and Storyteller. In the unlikely event that anyone else wants to post this anywhere, just give me credit for my shoddy work and tell me where its going.  
  
It's been a very, very long time. He's a little hazy as to exactly how long because at the time it didn't seem so important, and he's pretty certain he didn't have any idea that he wouldn't ever return. But at a guess, he thinks it's been at least a century since he left England. So, yeah, admittedly it's been a while, but he's certain he'd remember something like that. But for the life of him, he simply cannot imagine where on earth the little girl with the arm-socks got that accent.  
  
She yammers incessantly, like a kid that's just learned to talk and is so pleased with itself that being quiet is not an option, and she doesn't seem to care whether or not anyone else is listening.  
  
But he hears her. He hears her babbling until the early hours about nothing in particular, finds himself hoping against hope every night that his accent doesn't sound like hers, so ugly and grating. But he smiles at her sometimes, this kid. Because he knows fine that bound up in all that nonsense about calling and destiny and how exciting everything is, that this child is absolutely and unarguably petrified.  
  
Ten minutes before the sun rises, and the kid is silent. Regular as clockwork, and he wonders if she knows. He doubts it. Swings his legs off his cot, pulls his jeans on and pads silently up the stairs and into the house.  
  
He's shocked to see her there, sitting at the island in the kitchen with a bowl of cereal and a glass of juice.  
  
'Isn't it a bit early for you, pet?'  
  
'Are you kidding me? This is the only time I get the kitchen to myself.'  
  
Dawn catches him casually glancing down the hall, like he's looking for signs of life to prove her point, but she knows that he's looking for Buffy. He's always looking for Buffy.  
  
'She's still asleep.' His head snaps round to face her, like maybe he's going to deny that he knows what she's talking about. But he doesn't. Instead she sees his brow furrow slightly in the way it does when he's trying to figure something out.  
  
'Right. I was heading for the shower.' Only he doesn't seem to be going anywhere. He's standing in the doorway barefoot with a towel in his hand, watching her with his mouth slightly open as though he's seeing her for the first time. 'What are you looking at?' She says, mostly to her cereal at first, but she lifts her head to look at him when the question fades unanswered in the infinite space between them. Starts to think maybe he'll just go without saying anything else, that this early rise had been for nothing.  
  
His mouth begins to smile, but something tells him its not appropriate and he almost visibly shakes it off. She's beautiful, this girl. And, by god, he misses her terribly. He misses the times when he was her first stop after school, when she would come running into his crypt to tell him tales of boys she'd met, her words so slurred with speedy excitement and punctuated by girlie squeals that he barely caught a word she said. He misses the petulant folding of her arms and raising of her eyebrow when he refused for the umpteenth time to teach her how to fight. Misses the way that her adolescent mind telescoped and exaggerated everything to make even the choice of nail polish for her toes seem like a life or death situation. Misses her innocence and her love and her life.  
  
But looking at her, he sees that the wide-eyed kid is gone. He wants to ask when it happened, how he could have missed it, if she's ever coming back.  
  
'You grew up.' An accurate, yet glaringly obvious observation which almost makes him flinch at its bluntness. But as he watches her, casually eating her cereal with one hand while the other alternates between lifting a glass to her lips and flicking through the pages of some anonymous magazine, he knows that there's no other explanation. Last year, had she attempted to refill her juice while seemingly concentrating intently on the magazine article as she was doing now, it would have resulted in a sticky orange mess over her and the worktop, and would have rendered the magazine unreadable. Somehow when his back had been turned, she had managed to introduce her body to the concept of co-ordination and it has given her a womanly grace and calm that he hadn't taken the time to notice until now.  
  
Suddenly, catching the look on his face, a mixture of sadness, amazement and what she thinks might be pride, Dawn thinks she might cry. She picks up her bowl and turns to the sink so that he won't see, so that he won't think he's forgiven. She misses him, of course she does, but she had trusted him and loved him almost as much as she did Buffy and he had thrown it all away. 'Yeah, had to happen sometime.' It's lame, and she knows it but she busies herself by trying to scrub a hole in the spoon before drying it with exaggerated care and attention.  
  
'I miss you, Bit.' She spins round in such a rush that it makes her hair fan out behind her, the sudden movement causing him to take an involuntary step backwards, and for a terrible second he thinks she might hit him. But she doesn't, of course she doesn't. She just looks at him accusingly, wordlessly, for a long moment, chewing on her bottom lip all the while. She's not used to this from him: even with the knowledge that his soul had changed him, she hasn't experienced this quiet, apologetic manner that he seems to have developed with the main purpose of tugging at her heartstrings and changing her stony-set opinion of him to mush. But still, he doesn't stop there.  
  
'I'm sorry for what I did, you trusted me and.' He looks at her raised eyebrows and knows she's waiting for the words 'I tried to rape your sister, then left you high and dry while someone tried to kill you again.', or something to that effect, to tumble from his mouth and so he stops dead. She rolls her eyes and folds her arms, causing a feeling of shame and sorrow to peel like echoing bells through his body because he did those things, and worse, but he can't say it out loud. With a deep, unnecessary breath he looks at her with gentle eyes and tries to make his voice strong. 'I want you to be able to trust me again, Dawn. To know I'll protect you.'  
  
In reality, he could leave it at that. He's said his piece and so its shower-time, right? Well, no. He owes her a right to reply, to scream at him, to hit him, to curse and cry. For some reason, allowing people to be angry at him gives him a sense of comfort, probably because it means they're still alive. And that's an improvement.  
  
Time passes slowly before she speaks again, and he's prepared for name- calling and outpouring of hatred, perhaps some more threats of violence.  
  
'I know you're sorry Spike. I see you. I see the way you look at her and I know you're sorry, and I know you would rather let the First kill you than hurt her again.'  
  
She sees him relax a little, blowing out the air that he'd been holding in his lungs, dropping his shoulders, preparing to nod and smile a little. She's not finished though, and his face falls as she speaks again.  
  
'But I don't need you to protect me Spike. I never did. I have Buffy, Xander, Willow and Giles to look after me. And Willow, Xander, Giles and me have all the wannabe slayers and Buffy to look after us. And the wannabe slayers have Buffy to look after them. But no one's looking after Buffy. That's what I trusted you to do. That's what I trust you to do now.'  
  
Dawn almost feels sorry when he bows his head and nods silently, seemingly dumbstruck by what she'd said. He used to be proud and arrogant, unrepentant and unashamed, but now he just looks humbled with that chided- child expression on his face.  
  
As for him, he gets it now. Dawn had seen him as a constant, as something certain in her chaotic life, that he wouldn't die, he wouldn't leave, and he wouldn't hurt her sister. She felt Buffy's mortality every bit as strongly as Buffy did and Dawn had trusted him to keep death and pain away from her sister, instead of letting it rain down on her in spades. And, God, he's sorry.  
  
'If you're going for a shower you better go now before the girls start waking up.'  
  
And as he stares at her, at her pretty face that now pretends to be captivated with a mark on the kitchen floor, a terrible truth hits him. If he stands here long enough, maybe just another minute, she's going to hug him. Because just under her grown-up surface, the child he knows is pleading for her to run the few feet that separate them, throw her arms around his neck and sob into his t-shirt. Because some things never change.  
  
He knows how hard this was for her, how much effort it has taken her face to remain stern and for her voice to remain strong, for her to invite him back in without breaking her resolve and being soft with him. He knows if he waits here till the kid wins out, till she hugs him, it'll break her. And he knows he can't do that again.  
  
He's so proud of her and what she has become. He remembers calling her 'bitty-Buffy' before, but its not like that now. She's got a strength, beauty and passion all of her own, and he loves her. Not because she's Buffy's sister, but because she's Dawn and that's just fine with him.  
  
So he turns on his heel and starts manoeuvring his way around the sleeping bodies that lie between the kitchen and the stairs. When his foot hits the bottom step, he hears it. It's so quiet that it almost gets lost among the breathy snuffles of the slumbering girls, but its there and its unmistakable.  
  
'Miss you too, Spike.' 


End file.
